


Siren's Skin

by Lokei



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-10
Updated: 2009-05-10
Packaged: 2017-10-18 21:43:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/193609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lokei/pseuds/Lokei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She will never have his heart, but it doesn’t matter.  Mortal hearts are so fragile, and she is happy enough to leave it in someone else’s keeping.  In the soft spaces between the worlds where gods and immortals pass each other like thieves in the night, he is all hers, hers and the ship’s.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Siren's Skin

She will never have his heart, but it doesn’t matter. Mortal hearts are so fragile, and she is happy enough to leave it in someone else’s keeping. In the soft spaces between the worlds where gods and immortals pass each other like thieves in the night, he is all hers, hers and the ship’s.

When the seas are calm and the souls of the living rest easily on the waves, she beckons the Dutchman into the deep currents. It is far more biddable when its captain takes one of his infrequent rests, and she may coax it to her will when his is quiet.

There in the deeps, she strokes it along its weather beaten boards, feathering long strands of seaweed through the rigging and over the sails until the Dutchman shivers into her touch, its timbers groaning like some massive marine feline.

She materializes in the captain’s cabin then, to watch the young captain arch and sigh in his slumber, as responsive to his ship as the ship is to him. She chose this one well. That other, who hid his heart away and grew to hate the ship she gave him, the bridge it formed between them, he stopped listening. He could no longer hear her voice in the Dutchman’s timbers or taste her kisses in the flung spray.

This one is different. She does not hold his heart, but she can touch her fingers to his face, and when she does, his eyes open to catch her in a gaze as deep and liquid as her own.  
The smile he gives her is knowing, and warms her as the sun on the coral. The years he spends within her waves never seem to touch the forge fire at his core. She is dressed in little more than fish scales and moonlight, which scatter at his touch to illuminate the cabin in a soft, iridescent gleam. His hands draw new magnetic fields across her skin, his internal compass unerringly finding her unmappable routes, making the currents around them surge and the Dutchman quiver in sympathy.

She will never touch his heart, but she prefers it that way. Some piece of him will never be hers, never be tamed, and never be part of the great sea-swept destiny which has called him since his youth. One piece of him called to the land makes him his own man, something she’ll never quite have all of, tempting and distant and bewitching as she knows herself to be. They are three of a kind: the goddess, the captain, the ship; immortal and mysterious and bound to each other beyond the comprehension of any sailor who dreams merely of freedom.

She lets his heat be an excuse to melt into his waiting arms for a while and then out of them, dissipating through the water and through the cabin’s walls, leaving a glimmer of fish scales behind, taking with her the echoes of the captain’s murmur and the shadows of the rigging on the sand.


End file.
